|
| Introduction
| | This Vaio is
a nice machine: Light and robust (carbon fiber shell), fast (Intel dual
core), featuring long battery life (stamina mode), and - why not -
elegant. I must say, however, that Sony and M$ are saving on
strange things: The user manual is not
printed (it has to be downloaded from Sony's web site), and no recovery
disks are supplied (you have to burn your own). When I told my
system administrator that I was going to install Linux on a Vaio, he
warned me: "Vaio = guaio" (i.e. "trouble" in
Italian). On the contrary, I got an almost satisfactory
installation
of Kubuntu 6.10 i386. Open issues concern (i) suspending,
(ii)
stamina mode. Everything
else
works well, more or less out of the box. Old problems with the microphone
have been fixed. With the
help of live CDs
it has been easy to test other distributions (SUSE, Knoppix) and
architectures (amd64). (K)ubuntu currently outperforms the
others. |
What Works and What Doesn't
| | Detailed infos on this
laptop can be found here,
and here is the result of lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 01d8 (rev a1)
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 16)
09:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
09:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a
09:04.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
Results
using Kubuntu 6.10 i386: The
kernel is now 2.6.17-11-generic.
| 2
processors | Yes |
Note: with the generic kernel only |
| Ethernet,
Wireless | OK |
|
| Bluetooth |
Detected |
Not
tried | | Modem |
~OK |
Using driver from
www.linuxant.com; can't
check for dial tone |
| Sound |
OK | |
| Microphone |
OK |
|
| Graphic
card | OK |
Using
NVIDIA drivers | | External
display | 1/2
OK | Rudimentary
support | | Touchpad |
~OK |
Tapping
and vertical scrolling; no
horizontal scrolling |
| USB
devices | OK |
Flash
disk, camera | | Fn-Fx
Keys | ~OK |
Volume
and brightness work; no
screen switch |
| Stamina
mode | NO |
|
| Sleep |
NO | |
| Hibernate
to disk | OK |
Broken by an update |
|
Before starting
| Be sure to prepare Vista
recovery disks first!
If you don't, then in case of trouble you may have to pay for
restoring the system. Recovery disks can be made with the
Sony
Recovery Kit, see the backup and restore manual (this one is printed
and included in the package).
Second, shrink Vista's main partition (there may be a second, smaller
partition for restoring the system in a faster way - when possible)
using whatever utilities M$ and Sony give you. If you shrink the main Vista
partition with a Linux partitioner, Vista will not boot anymore.
I didn't know this when I started, so I had to restore Vista
using the
restore disks. At the first attempt it did not work - the
Sony
restoring utility did not start. Only after formatting the
main
Vista partition with a Linux live disk the boot procedure recognized
that the recovery procedure had to be selected. From that
point
on, everything matched the description on the recovery manual.
During the recovery procedure I could resize Vista's
partition and
create another partition that later I filled in with Linux partitions.
| Loading Linux
| | Live DVDs are
available for all the distributions mentioned in this report. |
Modem (thanks to linmodem.org for their
support)
|
The
internal modem is a Conexant soft modem. The
driver can be downloaded from www.linuxant.com.
Click on the drivers
tab and choose Conexant, then click on the download link
placed on the left column under the HSF section. After
accepting the agreement, choose the cnxtinstall.run
method and follow the instructions - the installation script will do
everything for you. After installation the system should be rebooted.
The free driver works at a limited speed; if you
want full
speed then you should buy a product key. If you
have a static address for your wired network,
then you may want to tune network settings because the ppp daemon does
not override the default gateway of the wired interface. There are
several possible ways of getting the right gateway, but none of them is
very elegant for a "common user" (unfortunately knetworkmanager -
that would be an ideal tool for changing interfaces - does not
automatically detect wired networks
and modems in Ubuntu). Since I'm using the modem more frequently than
Ethernet, my choice is preventing eth0 (the wired interface) from being
enabled when the system boots (you can do this from start menu -> System
settings -> Network
settings by entering the administration mode,
double clicking on eth0 and toggling a flag). When I need
Ethernet I enable it manually (from the same control panel, or simply
with a command sudo
ifup eth0). So far I have not been
able to make the modem recognize
dial tones. Some combinations of +GCI (the command for
setting
the country) and X2-X4 (the commands that usually force the modem to
wait for a dial tone) yield an error; some others never recognize the
dial tone; others simply ignore the dial tone. One should
probably look for specific Conexant commands. |
| Suspending
| | Suspend
to RAM (sleep) causes the system
to freeze. On
the contrary, the hibernate modality (suspend
to disk) works perfectly. Same for hibernate, since the
last update. |
|
Stamina
mode (power saving) |
| It
is supposed to increase battery life significantly (quite good for
intercontinental flights). If the system is booted with the
powersaving switch on "stamina" position, the system freezes.
If the switch is moved to "stamina" at run time, apparently
nothing happens (the system stays in "speed" mode). |
| External
display (projector) |
None
of the Fn-Fx
combinations changes video mode (internal, external, both).
The
nv driver included in the distribution has the external display
constantly on. One can see the desktop but the image is noisy
(I
tried a projector).
The NVIDIA driver (see below) produces a clear image. In the
standard configuration, the driver activates only one display.
To
activate the external display one can (i) change screen resolution, and
(ii) restart the X server (e.g. brutally with Ctl-Alt-Backspace).
Afterward only the external display will be selected.
There may be a better way of switching displays, and possibly
activating them both. I have not yet tried configuring the
external display in xorg.conf, possibly from the control panel. |
| Graphic
card (NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 GPU) |
To
get graphic
acceleration one needs the NVIDIA driver, which is not part of the
standard release because it is distributed with a different licence (it
is free, anyway). Here is a simple sequence of commands to
download, install, and configure it.
- sudo
apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
During the reconfiguration procedure, I selected the standard values
with the following exceptions:
- driver:
"nvidia"
- keyboard layout: "it" (I have an italian
keyboard)
- I added 1280x800 to pre-selected
monitor resolutions.
Then restart the X server to activate the new driver. As a
test,
you may type "glxinfo | grep direct", that should output "direct
rendering: yes".
|
Pre-installed
software
|
| The
software coming
with the distribution is oriented to an office workstation +
multimedia. Several packages we commonly use (Emacs, LaTeX,
web
page editing, development packages, etc.) are missing but can
be
easily downloaded, installed and configured with Adept or apt commands. |
|
Other distros
& architectures
| A brief report
on the other live distributions I tried:
- Knoppix
5.1.0: freezed during system boot
- SUSE
10.2: wireless card not recognized, no Fn-Fx keys, wrong screen
resolution autodetection; not further explored.
- Kubuntu
6.10 AMD64: no brightness keys, problems with
graphics (the login screen immediately after system boot is unreadable
- wrong configuration? - and the X server may have to be
restarted
several times to get proper settings); some packages are not available
for 64 bits architectures.
- Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty
Fawn): times are not mature. The automatic upgrade fails for
some dependency problem. The system installed from scratch is not yet
completely stable. The NVIDIA drivers (nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-new)
do not work (the window manager does not start). The
microphone does not yet work. Moreover,
the new partitioner forces a change to partition size in some cases.
| Piero
A. Bonatti |